Teaching Languages Online

TTLO Online Institute History

The online technology institute 2011 on social networking was a great success with regard to the amount that the participants were able to learn over the 9-week institute. Though delivery of this online course was much more labor-intensive than a traditional course. One co-facilitators logged over 1,400 email notifications and over 300 hours of development and interaction time. Both of the facilitators learned a good deal about the process of offering an online course on technology. Facillitators shared the challenges and successes with the development and implementation of this online course at conferences (see below) following this initial offering of the institute. The online institute has been offered as part of the CARLA summer institute program ever since, in varying lengths.

The course facilitators have presented about their experiences with this online course at MWALLT (Oct, 2011), at CALICO (June 2012), and offered it to the TESOL EVO (Jan-Feb, 2012) as a 5-week course.

The experience gained in teaching this institute online was applied to the STARTALK: Transitioning to Teaching Language Online (TTLO) course, developed in Spring 2013 and offered for 5 years.

Consequently, the CARLA version of TTLO has been offered every summer in formats ranging from 7-weeks to 3-weeks, and occasionally as a semester-length course, but now settling in for 4-weeks in length. It has also been offered to selected groups of EFL teachers in Pakistan in a collaboration with the American Embassy in Pakistan and Evolution.